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Twingly to bring a Ninja’s touch to realtime sharing

Written on 11th June 2009 0 COMMENTS
Martin Bryant, Co-founder, Social Media Café Manchester

Swedish startup Twingly has today hinted that something big, possibly involving ninjas, is coming from the company soon.

Twingly has been offering a blog trackback service since early 2007 and more recently launched a blog searching tool that compares favourably to its better known rivals, Google Blog Search and Technorati. Now the company has announced ‘Project Shinobi’, a mysterious product that they claim “will become the next great platform for social media”.

Taking its name from a 1980s Sega videogame about ninjas, Project Shinobi appears to be some kind of real-time social news aggregation tool. In a vague blog post today, CEO Martin Källström writes:

“On October 1st, 2009, Twingly will join the ranks of web services working together to improve your experience of social and traditional media. With Project Shinobi, we are aiming to provide a more social, more relevant and more realtime experience, integrating with the services you already use. Not only for people that are early adopters of social media, but accessible and immediately valuable for anyone.”

Realtime social aggregation first hit its stride with April’s relaunch of FriendFeed as a non-stop ‘waterfall’ of shared content and discussion. With its highly configurable interface, system of Groups for specific topics and the ability to use the service via IM and email, FriendFeed has become an incredibly useful tool for earl-adopters. However, mainstream use still eludes it and if Twingly are aiming at a wide audience from the start, Project Shinobi could be the product that takes real-time to the masses.

Of course, the web world is a fickle one and it may not turn out that way. Still, as grand statements of intent go Project Shinobi is going to be an interesting one to follow.

Twingly to bring a Ninjas touch to realtime sharing Swedish startup Twingly has today hinted that something big, possibly involving ninjas, is coming from the company soon.

Now the company has announced ‘Project Shinobi’, a mysterious product that they claim “will become the next great platform for social media”.

(more…)

aggregation, real-time, Twingly

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SecondBrain, definitely worth a second look

Written on 23rd June 2008 3 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

During the past few months, I’ve seen a specific start-up keep popping up: SecondBrain. It promised me to aggregate all my content in order to organize life 2.0. “Yeah yeah”, I thought, “Seen it, been there, done that – never worked for me”. So my attention went to one of the other twenty start-ups that are brought under my attention on a daily basis.

But last week, I received an invite from another blogger and Boris sent me a press release about the beta 2 launch of SecondBrain. So I decided to give SecondBrain a second chance (quite a corny line, uh?). Turns out that I might actually use this service. Why? Well, it does a really good job synchronizing the majority of the Web 2.0 services – from Flickr to Digg and from Wordpress to Google Docs – ALL your content in stored in one huge media library. For some reason, this gives me a safe feeling. I have it all stored in one place, like a giant bookcase with my photo albums, video tapes, books, articles, and lots of uh.. bookmarks.

SecondBrain

Apart from the safe feeling, in the end – that’s just personal, there are more advantages, particularly in the field of organizing:

SecondBrain generates one tag cloud for all your online stuff.
You can create collections, regardless of file types. This is easy for reference.
There’s a rather solid search engine.

Founder Lars Teigen has told Mashable that SecondBrain focuses on organizing your content first, after that, they’ll add the unavoidable social layers. The new features of Beta 2 prove his point: the navigation has improved, you now have 1GB for personal file uploads and, ok, there’s a share function.

Personally, I don’t need a social touch to SecondBrain. For that purpose, I use the services with which SB is synchronizing. I just want to look up all my saved content about my favorite band, hobby, or travel destination – just like a real bookshelf.